A workflow system prototype for the modelling of a regulatory and other processes in the pharmaceutical area.

Strandberg O.

Strandberg O (1996) A workflow system prototype for the modelling of a regulatory and other processes in the pharmaceutical area. Report no. 70/96 from Uppsala University Center for Human-Computer Studies, Uppsala, Sweden.

Abstract

The drug industry faces problems with long development times and costly delays. Documents must have a long lifetime and evolve over periods as long as 50 years. Information technology for the drug industry must hence focus on business process reengineering and document management. As a part of business process reengineering and information technology, work flow technology is often mentioned as the "silver bullet". However, few if any of today's commercial work flow systems take the user into account. They /the systems) are very capable and feature laden, but require a programmer or equivalent to define work flows, active managers to monitor them and disciplined users to work with them. This paper attempts to remedy this situation and presents a prototype of a user interface to the different parts of a work flow system: the work flow definition tool, the monitoring and administration tool and the users in box/to do-list. The prototype is a working system with limited functionality that uses a shared database approach but is intended to use a commercial engine in the actual implementation. The foremost feature of the system is that it makes little difference between ad-hoc and predefined work flows to reduce the cost of constructing "everyday" work flows that may or not may be used again. Also addressed is exception handling. The intended customers are pharmaceutical companies and drug regulatory authorities, but should work in any environment. The prototype was developed for Pharmasoft AB, Uppsala, Sweden, a leading producer of software for the pharmaceutical market-place. To minimize the risk of tying the interface to any specific system and gain knowledge of the problems involved, a rudimentary work flow engine was implemented. The Work flow Management Coalition´s proposed WAPI 2 and reference model was considered during the implementation. Also included is a discussion on work flow technology in general in an organizational setting and a short introduction to SGML, Standard Generalized Markup Language.